Germany's Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space

4. “Post-Colonial” Mappings: Cartographic Representations of Lost Colonial Space in the Interwar Period

124 Chapter 4 “Post-­ Colonial” Mappings: Cartographic Representations of Lost Colonial Space in the Interwar Period Looking back at the literature published in the decades preceding World War I, we find a complex set of representations describing German presence in the Polish East in colonial terms.1 Gustav Freytag’s early, unencumbered depiction of German territorial expansion was followed by an entire genre of German colonial novels investigating the hardships attending colonial settlement in the Wild East. Set during the period of German inner colonization, these texts depicted the threats posed by unbounded space and the anxieties aroused by ambiguous lines of racial distinction. This literature responded with an elaborate construction of racialized space that allowed perceived threats of racial contamination to be described in the concrete terms of spatial threat. The discourse that emerged was so pervasive that it structured meaning in texts not overtly engaging its themes, as was seen in Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest. World War I introduces a rupture in this colonial discourse as it responds first to the confidently anticipated German eastward expansion envisioned during the war, and then to the sudden, unexpected, and devastating loss of German state territory afterward, in the wake of military defeat. In the postwar period, attention shifts from discussions of how to best administer the Polish Prussian territories to those of how to get them back into German hands. German colonial discourse undertakes the seemingly paradoxical move of shifting from an emphasis on the demands of the present to a focus on the achievements of the distant past. At the same time, the models of racialized space developed in the nineteenth century undergo transformations into widely propagated popular theories about the essential nature of völkisch space in the present. In a specifically German articulation of the “post-­ colonial,” narratives of past colonial accomplishment come to be mobilized to justify land claims in the present. “Post-Colonial” Mappings    125 Wartime Dreams of Eastward Expansion I still consider the question of the Eastern Marches to be one of the most important policy issues, regardless of the reconfigurations that the World War brings to the current Prussian state border in the east and beyond it.2 —Bernhard Fürst von Bülow (1916) The former chancellor of the German Empire penned these words in a moment of wartime optimism. Germany’s eastern offensive was showing signs of success , and Germans representing a wide range of political positions were envisioning various forms and degrees of eastward expansion.3 Large segments of the population demanded the extension of Germany’s eastern border to create a new buffer zone vis-­ à-­ vis Russia, and some even advocated the inclusion of recently occupied Russian territory in this plan. In this context of military success , Germans weren’t questioning whether land in the east should be brought under German control, but instead, how much, and under what conditions.4 In his September Program of 1914, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg had drafted a set of war aims focused upon the consolidation of German continental power. One of the central items on his agenda was the establishment of an organized Mitteleuropa, envisioned as an economic and military union of the Central European region under German leadership.5 Further to the right, the president of the Pan-­ German League, Heinrich Claß, had drafted a memorandum in 1914 on behalf of his organization calling for broad annexations of land in the East for the purpose of settling Germans and increasing Germany’s size and power. Claß’s plan called for the incorporation of sizable regions that were to be cleared of their non-­ German inhabitants; Poles and Jews were to be pushed out into their own, separately designated states.6 Although Claß’s proposals were quite radical, studies of German war aims have shown that they were merely an extension of views espoused within the national mainstream.7 On June 20, 1915, well over one thousand people signed a petition to the chancellor demanding that Germany’s eastern border be extended into Russia, and that within this region, a border strip be evacuated for the purpose of German settlement. Exemplifying the extent to which such demands reflected social leadership, this petition is known as the Professoren­ eingabe (or Intellektuelleneingabe) due to the 352 university professors who were among those signing it.8 In the language of those promoting eastward expansion, most of the rheto- 126    Germany’s Wild East...